A reproductive game changer

Quote:

...researchers have reprogrammed human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells into the cells that eventually become eggs and sperm... theoretically, an infertile patient's skin cells, for example, could be taken and reprogrammed into iPS cells, which, like embryonic stem cells, have the ability to become every cell type in the human body. Those cells could then be transformed into germ-line precursor cells that would eventually become eggs and sperm... a man with a low sperm count, for example, may be able to have more of his own sperm generated to fertilize his partner's egg.

But a man with a low sperm count getting extra sperm generated from his somatic cells is among the least interesting applications of this technology. Some alternative applications:

• A lesbian could have sperm made from her cells to fertilize her partner.


• A gay man could have eggs made from his cells to be fertilized by his partner. Note that this would require a surrogate mother to bear the child, at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars. At least until artificial wombs are invented - probably a more difficult task than making germ cells from random adult cells.


• A heterosexual woman could have sperm made from her cells to fertilize her husbands eggs. Seems kind of pointless, but it would get you 15 minutes of fame, or at least a PhD in Transgressive Art at Yale.

Men would no longer be essential for society's survival (women would still be necessary until we have artificial wombs). There's no obvious reason why female separatist communities couldn't thrive, instead of slowly physically dying out. The next generation would be conceived with this technology - and it would, of course, be all female - no Y chromosome would be involved.

Could they have an fitness advantage over hetero couples? Women seem to take more to child-rearing than men, and since both women in the couple have wombs, they can both be pregnant at the same time. The children would all be daughters, and if women are the reproductive bottleneck, that bottleneck just got bigger, if they want it to. How would the daughters of two helicopter moms turn out?

It would also give hope to older women. A 50 year old female careerist would have the option of hiring a surrogate, leveraging the money she has made into children instead of an extravagantly appointed empty house.

This technology will not be ready this year or next year, but I expect to live to see it (I'm not particularly techno-optimistic like some people, but this technology really doesn't seem that far-fetched).

Liberal HBD

There are a few liberals who accept the existence of heritable cognitive difference that are not equally distributed by race. Examples: Peter Singer, Liberal Biorealist.

They're long on lofty idealism, illustrated by this quote from Bruce Lahn:

Equality of opportunity and respect for human dignity should be humankind’s common aspirations, notwithstanding human differences no matter how big or small.

Sounds good, as far as it goes. But they're short on thinking through the policy implications of HBD. If they have, I've missed it.

Here's the key question for those who want to mix liberalism with HBD:

Since you believe that cognitive traits are hereditary, you must believe that dysgenic fertility trends are a problem. What do you want to do about it? Limit the fertility of the kind of people that shouldn't be having kids (who are disproportionately non-white)? Start Lebensborns for smart people? Let the left end of the bell curve starve on the streets?

Or continue current policies, which amounts to a dysgenic breeding program, until the system collapses? This seems to be the only course of action that would be acceptable to most liberals. It's already sanctified in the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which calls for a right to food (article 25), and a right to reproduce (article 16). I hope I don't have to explain that those two together amount to a right to reproduce without limit, with your offspring supported by the taxpayer. You don't oppose human rights, do you? If you do, you might want to reconsider whether the liberal shoe really fits you. Go to Daily Kos and see if they accept you as one of your own.

I believe that this is an exhaustive list of all possible courses of action. The only way out of this is to assume that we'll all be genetically modified, transhuman geniuses in 50 years, a shaky proposition at best. And even that wouldn't stop us from hitting the Malthusian wall (but that's a topic for another post).

Liberal creationists vs conservative creationists

Liberal creationists believe in evolution, but only from the neck down. To them, the significance of evolution is that it does not require God - it tears down religion and dovetails nicely with atheism. But it has no relevance to human group difference. Well, maybe a little bit of relevance to traits that aren't very important, like skin color, hair texture, dentition, and earwax consistency. But could it account for any of the cognitively important racial differences we observe? Liberal creationists like the people at the Richard Dawkins forum: Nyah nyah nyah, I'm not listening!

Conservative creationists (what most people just call "creationists") don't believe in macroevolution - the descent of man from other primates - but they may well believe in microevolution. Microevolution is Biblically correct - in fact, creationists need some way to explain the differences between various branches of Adam and Eve's descendants, so it fits nicely with creationism. Hence we find creationists, like Lawrence Auster, who are also HBDers*.

What are the policy implications of liberal creationism? None, except inasmuch as it tears down religion, and traditional morality and social institutions with it. But the policy implications of conservative creationism are, with few exceptions, identical with, or at least compatible with, the Darwinist right.

I'll take an HBD-aware conservative creationist like Auster over a liberal creationist like Dawkins any day. �What do I care whether the world is six billion years old or six thousand? What do I care whether a criminal is demonically possessed or mentally ill? �Auster's right where it counts. �Dawkins and his ilk are right where it doesn't.
�

* Auster would probably not like to be grouped with HBDers, because HBD is associated with reductionists and materialists, but he accepts the core proposition of HBD, which is that different human groups have evolved down significantly different paths.

Free will and justice

I don't put much stock in free will. I don't see how it fits in with the reductionist, Darwinian view that we are material bags of meat. To postulate free will is equivalent to postulating a spirit, a soul, or some other Darwinianly Incorrect entity. If we are nothing but matter, then, as Baron d'Holbach put it in the 18th century:

...matter is not a free agent, since it cannot act otherwise than it does, in virtue of the laws of its nature, or of its existence; that consequently, heavy bodies must necessarily fall; light bodies by the same necessity rise; fire must burn; man must experience good and evil, according to the quality of the beings whose action he experiences.

I have never seen a credible rebuttal of this position from a mechanistic materialistic point of view. I assume that's because there isn't one.

An atheist and a materialist, d'Holbach was a radical in his time, but the typical SWPL is now an atheist and a materialist. The typical SWPL also believes in free will - even scientists do. But we're slowly catching up with d'Holbach. �Science is gradually chipping away at the conventional belief in free will. Behavioral influences of some genes have already been identified. �This has significant implications: �one Italian judge recently gave a lighter sentence to a murderer on the grounds that he has a gene variant that predisposes him to violence.

This fits with a moralistic vision of justice, in which criminals are punished in proportion to their culpability. We have long had laws on the books clearing the criminally insane of responsibility for their crimes. But from a practical point of view, releasing criminals who are genetically predisposed to commit crimes = FAIL. These are exactly the criminals who are most likely to commit another crime - so why would we want to endanger the public? Shouldn't they be given extra time, if anything?

And why should the only practical consequence of genetic influences on criminality be to do things that good progressives would find congenial, like coddling criminals? How about some old time eugenics? Spawn camp the little future criminals, or at least pay their mothers to use Depo Provera. Failing that, you could imprison those who are particularly likely to commit crimes before they actually do it, sparing the victim some trouble. I know this idea seems reprehensible to almost everybody, but is it not also reprehensible to let people who are known to be likely to commit crimes wander the streets until they claim their victims? Doing so is sort of like enacting the plot of that new movie where the protagonists can get a million dollars if they open a box that kills a random stranger, except that you get a sense of moral correctness instead of money. You may reject these policies on moralistic grounds, but you have to admit that there's utilitarian case to be made for them.

And if you're going to accept the reality of HBD when it comes to criminality, why not accept it as it relates to other traits, with all of the unsavory policy changes it implies?

This is probably going to become an important issue as more behaviorally significant genes are identified. I hope that our elites can figure out some use for this information other than to identify and release the most dangerous criminals.

The Romans were dicks (part II in a series)

This is the second entry in a series intended to show that squeamishness towards the suffering of enemy civilians is a trait of modern westerners, not a human universal.

I've already written about Rome's comically brutal, yet effective, maltreatment of the Jews after the Second Jewish War.


"From the Arch of Titus: Romans loot a menorah and some video cameras Jerusalem. The Jews were in the movie business even then."

But nothing in that entry goes into how this brutality was portrayed to or perceived by the Roman public. To rectify this omission, here are some examples of state-sponsored Roman artwork that portrayed war.

Here's a third-century coin, part of a series of coins with the words "FEL TEMP REPARATIO" - "restoration of happy times" - stamped on them, depicting a Roman slaughtering a barbarian with a spear.



I don't think most Americans would find this act unacceptable. The barbarian is apparently a soldier in the field, and even most liberals still accept that people die in war. But we would not emphasize it - it was a rather more gruesome depiction of their relationship with their conquered peoples than we expect to find on our coins.



"Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative."

On to the Column of Marcus Aurelius. If you're not a Rome geek, you still may know Marcus as the good emperor at the beginning of the movie "Gladiator," or as the author of one of the only books written by a head of state which is read by anybody for any reason other than historical interest in the author. But he also kicked some barbarian ass, and had this commemorated on a column which stands to this day. Here are some of the scenes that he (or his friends) chose to celebrate.

Romans executing barbarian prisoners. I especially like the expression on the guy's face, and the boot on the head.


"The horror... the horror."

Romans have barbarian prisoners beheaded. Note the severed heads and decapitated bodies on the ground. They seem to be compelling prisoners to assist in the execution of other prisoners.



Romans take women and children to be sold into slavery. Note the Roman driving a sword into the woman's shoulder.



So there you have it. I think it's safe to say that My Lai would have a PR coup to the Romans, rather than a PR disaster.

You look mahvelous!

Ever notice how the media selects particularly unflattering photos of people they don't like? Time Magazine gives us a perfect example in a recent op-ed about Nick Griffin of the rightwing BNP:

(h/t: commenter Rohan Swee @ VFR.)

This treatment is mostly reserved for the right, but sometimes it's sufficient just to be a shithead.

The Imperial Japanese were dicks (part I)

There's a long-running meme that the US lost the Vietnam War because of TV coverage. Supposedly, people can't stomach war its brutality is shoved in their faces. Here's the famous picture of an ARVN officer executing a Viet Cong officer, which, arguably, as much as any single image, helped turn American public opinion against the war.

�

This story may be true in modern America, but it's not a human universal. The mentality of the ARVN officer was such that he thought that executing a guerrilla, which is what you're supposed to do in a war, would make him and his side look good. �That's how people have generally thought outside of the modern West.

I've been collecting stories that show how other culture have or do perceive positively things that typical American would consider horrifying - public celebrations of things that would be considered distasteful, at best, and war crimes at worst, and would be either reviled or buried here. Here's one: a contest between two Japanese officers in 1937 over which one could kill 100 Chinese with his sword first. A typical passage:

...this contest to cut down 100 people is building towards a glorious conclusion. After these reporters entered Danyang, we chased after the Toyama unit, who were steadily progressing forward. 2nd Lt. Mukai spoke from the middle of the marching ranks of troops, smiling as he spoke.

"This guy Noda has caught up with me considerably, so he's starting to get lethargic. Don't worry about Noda's injury—it's nothing. The bones of some guy I cut down in Lingkou chipped my sword in one place, but it'll still be able to cut down 100 or 200 people, I'm sure. A reporter from Tonichi Daimai is going to be the judge."

Another head-chopping Japanese officer

Ghoulish, huh? This reads like something from a dystopian satire of Fox News written by a liberal. �But this was morale-boosting propaganda in Japan 70 years ago.

The prize, won by both officers: execution by the Chinese after the war.